The Met's weird decision to perform terrorist-chic 'Klinghoffer' – but not broadcast it – is the opposite of Solomonic

We have this, through a frayed copy of the New York Observer, that the late Arthur Gelb, fabled managing editor of the New York Times, used a tuning fork to test his baby son Peter’s musical talents. They turned out, alas, not to be extraordinary. But the father still thought that the child possessed some “interesting musical genes.” And why should he not have? After all, the tot had in his veins the blood of Jascha Heifetz, the Jewish wunderkind violinist from Vilna, his mother being the virtuoso’s niece.

Anyway, he did turn out to have a flair for the music business. After running divisions at Columbia Artists and Sony Classical, Peter Gelb was summoned to the helm at the Metropolitan Opera, from which perch he could decide on what was truly great. I don’t believe that he actually bestowed that accolade on either of the past season’s daring productions, Two Boys and The Nose. But the Met audience pronounced itself indifferent to both, either by not coming in the first place or, more devastatingly, by leaving early, as I confess I did. “Why,” a pal asked me, “do you make yourself a perpetual contender for operatic punishment?” “Because I hope to see another Billy Budd.”

Well, I am not buying tickets to the The Death of Klinghoffer for the next season. In 2003 I saw the Brooklyn Academy of Music production of the terrorist saga, which was so appallingly amoral that I forced myself through to the end as a sort of ethical discipline. Worse than amoral, it was tedious. Perhaps musical beauty cannot be made out of a tale of the cold-blooded killing of a crippled Jew.

In The Death of Klinghoffer, this crippled Jew, this virtually helpless victim, somehow becomes a symbol of Jewish power. This opera by the composer John Adams and the librettist Alice Goodman does not recoil in horror from the crime it depicts. In this account of the terrorist incident on the Achille Lauro in 1985 the killers have apocalyptic poetry on their side and the victims have bourgeois worries on theirs. But Peter Gelb has pronounced it a “great” work. And the New York Times appears to editorially agree. As it happens, however, the most devastating early-on critiques of the opera were precisely in the Times, as several scholarly sources have noted.

Its own then chief music critic Edward Rothstein, now a Times cultural critic at-large, contrasts the elevated historical framework of the Palestinians’ actions with the nudgy tawdriness of the Klinghoffers and their friends, the Rumours. But since the real setting is actually a deep-seated national conflict, the opera wreaks havoc with the Jews. Their representatives are not Israelis and not even American Zionists. Klinghoffer may as well be Willy Loman, and in the operas’s portrayal he has certain Lomanish traits. Willy may have been Jewish, but he was no Zionist.

The great historian of music Richard Taruskin, also in the Times, makes an ethical case against the slippery argument that all “art” should be protected by tolerance. His argument is not for censorship but for forbearance, for judgment. This testimony is an argument with the avant-garde cultural aristocracy which behaves as if they believe -and they may- that anything that is anti-American or anti-Zionist is ipso facto progressive, hence valid and virtuous. The opera, Mr. Taruskin wrote, simply “romanticiz(ed) terrorists.”

John Adams can work his clunky, chunky music to his heart’s content. And so I suppose can Alice Goodman work her poetry. Ms. Goodman was born a Jew. She is now an Anglican priest, serving the Church of England, first as chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge, latterly at a group of parishes near the university. The truth is that it is not Mr. Adams’ music that is at the core of the controversy. It is Ms. Goodman’s words. She is no free spirit in this church, which has been fighting with the Jewish nation and the British Jewish community for decades.

A year and a half ago, Ms. Goodman gave an interview to the Guardian in which she clearly felt at ease with her interlocutor, Stuart Jeffries. Her confessions, on which almost no one in the States has picked up, are revealing. “I converted to Christianity between writing the choruses and arias of Klinghoffer.” That is, the libretto was being written while she was completing her journey away from her Jewish upbringing.

“It was made more difficult…because my parents were still alive -very strong people with strong opinions. My family is observant and I had a proper Jewish upbringing.” She says that, while she stayed away from the more difficult ramifications of that upbringing, she nevertheless “plunged into the ‘hot quicksand’ of the Arab-Israeli conflict…into the vortex of questions about Israel’s right to exist…” It is clear that she doesn’t believe it has one. That’s the real message of the Metropolitan’s oh-so-daring production.

Writing the libretto was the culmination of a spiritual and ethical journey for Ms. Goodman. “The Judaism I was raised in was strongly Zionist. It had two foci… the Shoah (the Holocaust) and the State of Israel, and they were related in the same way that the crucifixion is related to the resurrection in Christianity. Even when I was a child, I did not totally buy that. I didn’t buy the State of Israel being recompense for the murder of European Jewry.”

This is the confessional testimony of the librettist. It is up to the board of the Metropolitan Opera and to Peter Gelb, a descendant of Jascha Heifetz, who played his violin to lift the spirits of Jewish Palestine and of the State of Israel, to decide whether they are willing to sponsor and endorse Alice Goodman’s faux innocent and malevolent view of the Arab war against Zion. If the depiction of the Jews and Israel in this work is too troubling to warrant the cancellation of its dissemination in movie houses (and Mr. Gelb was certainly correct in his decision not to show it cinematically), why is it not too troubling to present on the Met’s stage?

Why has the bourgeois Jew like Klinghoffer become a guilty hated freak again on the stage of the Metropolitan opera? It is typical of Nazi ideology to demonize the innocent Jew. Klinghoffer was not involved in the Palestinian Israeli conflict. Goodman has more hatred for the middle class American Jews, than she does for Israelis who are pretty much ignored here. It obviously reflects her own personal conflict with her own American Jewish family, and her extraordinary self hatred.
The hateful anti Jewish words that Goodman puts in the mouths of the terrorists were never uttered by them, they were invented by Goodman. She ridicules, demeans, and insults the suburban middle class Jewish Rumour family (the part of the opera that were thankfully reluctantly edited out in the Met version) in the same way as Goebbels Nazi propaganda created the images of the grotesque, ugly, deformed Jews. The Met is guilty of presenting and promoting Nazi like anti Jewish stereotypes that I never thought we would ever see again, yet history repeats itself.

Mr. Gelb was let go during the Sony/BMG merger and his former boss Ronald Wilford went to Beverly Sills begging her to hire Peter Gelb. A man with no experience in opera, other than ushering at the MET in his youth. He had never run an organ izations of this size, he had never booked a production. The one thing he had in his pocket was the ability to put together an HD brodcast network. After that was put into place, he had nothing to offer the MET. As we now see, his productions are gimmicks, good for one season and then the attendance drops to lower numbers than older pre-Gelb productions which have been playing there for years. It's time for the experiment to end and a professional be brought into the job with years of successful experience. The Vienna Staatsoper, the Berlin Staatsoper, the Chicago Lyric and Covent Garden have all reported record attendance during their 2013-14 seasons. Seems to me that's enough to get the ball rolling.

This work appears to have no heuristic value. Giving metaphorical value to a heinous murderous act, the murder of an innocent crippled old man is artistic bullying, done to suit the warped ethics of Gelb and Goodman. shame on all who thought this would be a good Met production!

Shakespearean plays have been placed in different times and places. If there is nothing wrong with the Death of Klinghoffer opera, as I have posted elsewhere, I would like to see the Death of Klinghoffer opera adapted to the story of the assassination of Robert Kennedy who was killed by a Palestinian, who killed RFK for his support of Israel. I would like to see it performed at the Met Opera House in NYC. RFK's assassination was earlier than Klinghoffer's. RFK was younger, healthier, and had more guards, and he had some warning, by the murder of his brother. RFK did not have a wife dying of terminal cancer like Klinghoffer. RFK was not handicapped, not partially paralyzed by a stroke and not in a wheelchair. RFK was killed by one man, Sirhan Sirhan. Klinghoffer was killed by a gang. They both have family still living. They both were American. Both had a relationship with NYC. I challenge the Met to do so. I want to see if the NY audience applauds the singing by the assassin in the opera. Sirhan Sirhan is still alive and in prison. He can be flown to NYC and presented to the audience. They can applaud a "freedom fighter". They can ask questions.

Would Adams/Goodman like to do a sequel where they show the humanity in the terrorists of 9/11? How would that go over in New York? I think the public would make sure that opera could never be seen in NYC. Adams/Goodman/Gelb are a collective disgrace in a world where millions of people are seeing their lives disrupted, if not ended, by Islamist terrorism. Strictly speaking, the PLO was not Islamist, but it certainly inspired lots of terrorism by the Islamists.

Thank you Mr. Peretz for your courage standing up and exposing the librettist. This went beyond even the moral equivalence crowd. I wish you strength to continue to write the naked truth and go against
the lock step leftists in the arts community.

Poor Mr. Klinghoffer, indeed. I'd love to see a poetic/operatic rendering of the story the eighteen Palestinian family members blasted to smithereens last night in the name of Zionist eschatology. I'm sure a balanced poet could make the missile launcher seem morally ambiguous, at least, if not downright heroic. This piece is amazing, and of course Gelb was cowardly to submit to the Jewish patron class and cancel the cinema presentations.